She stops
speaking in poetry and quotations. She puts aside Marx and Engels. Inside
herself, she recites The Jabberwock and Macavity. ‘Twas brillig and the
slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves,
and the mome raths outgrabe. His brow is deeply lined in thought, his head
is highly domed. You would know him if you saw him for his eyes are sunken
in.’ Inside herself, she conducts two-voiced arguments of insidious intent.
How many Dispirin does it take to kill yourself, she asks. She calculates
just how many would be required, four boxes, five boxes, maybe even ten
boxes. She will drink them with vodka, drink them with Mazoe mixed with club
soda. She does a comparative evaluation, Norolon versus Dispirin. On a
balance of probabilities, on the evidence of Norolon-induced abortions that
end up killing both foetus and mother, Norolon would be more effective.

Outside
herself, she helps to distribute the toast and tea in the mornings. Outside
herself, she stares outside the window in the afternoon, careful not to sit
there for too long. In her journal, she writes bright entries, with
exclamation marks about her future outside the Annexe. ‘I am going to
Oxford!’ she writes, ‘I am going be a Rhodes Scholar!’ The evening pills
empty her thoughts.

In the
evening, she does the Annexe shuffle.

*****

And then,
like that, Dr. Chikara says she can go back to her life. She and Ezekiel
sing Father Abraham one more time, three more times, seven more times.
Estelle joins in. Emilia conducts them, insisting that they stand in a choir
formation. Sonia applauds. MockingNurseMatilda shakes her head when she sees
them. ‘The choir of the mad,’ she says to the orderlies, but there is no
malice in her voice.

Emily walks
out of the door that has no handle on the inside. The last thing she sees is
Ezekiel saying ‘Abraham, Abraham’ while Emilia hits him on the head. She
stands on Second Street Extension, and waits for the little green bus. She
re-enters the walls of the halls of academe to nudges and whispered
comments. She is the subject of clever jokes, lawyer jokes.

‘She is not
a fit and proper person’, says one.

‘She is not
a competent witness,’ says another.

‘She
qualifies under the Mental Health Act,’ says a third.

So
concentrated is she on being normal that thoughts of Dispirin versus Norolon
recede to that part of her mind that is most active in fantasy. Her exam
results are stellar; she achieves seven firsts in one year. She receives the
University Book Prize three years in a row. Her essay on the presidential
pardon and the rule of law is published in the Legal Forum. But for
the rest of her three years at the university, she is known as Emily from
Law who tried to kill herself when her boyfriend, Gwinyai from Engines,
dumped her for Lydia, the tall, skinny girl from Sociology. Even first years
that were not there pass on the story, which grows with each telling and
retelling.

‘She climbed
a tree, that tree opposite the Student’s Union.’

‘She
swallowed 40 tablets.’

‘She was
found unconscious on the floor.’

‘Naked.’

‘She threw
herself in front of her boyfriend’s car.’

‘Not her
boyfriend’s car, it was the Dean of Students’ car.’

‘He took her
to hospital.’

‘Hospital,
chii, they put her in a car, on a bus, on a train, on a plane, to
Ingutsheni.’

The pinnacle
of absurdity is reached in Emily’s third year when a first year girl, seeing
Emily, and not knowing who she is, asks her, ‘Is it true that that Emma girl
from Law tried to kill herself in my room?’

It is true;
FirstYearGirl sleeps in Emily’s old room on P.

‘Don’t
listen to everything you hear,’ Emily says. ‘It happened on Q corridor.’ She
says this to be kind, but the next time that FirstYearGirl sees Emily, it is
with knowledge in her eyes. The Emma Girl from Law of legend has become the
in the flesh Emily walking towards her. She moves to the other side and
walks past Emily without meeting her eyes.

Among the
whispers and the pointing, Emily moves as the incarnation of the walking
mad. Though she relearns how to be normal, there is incontrovertible
evidence that the true lesson of her experience is lost on her: she falls in
love again, just as carelessly, almost as excessively, this time, with a
rugby-playing Economics student known to everyone but his mother as Tuggs.
‘I like you babes, I really do,’ Tuggs says after five weeks of unchained
sex in his narrow bed in Manfred Hodson, ‘but this can’t go on, you know
that. What if you go all crazy on me like you did with that guy from
Engines?’ This rejection is the first of many post-Gwinyai heart-breaks; but
she learns this: no heartbreak will ever again be sharp enough to send her
over the edge and over to the Annexe.

Each
heart-break is a little death, all the same.

*****

Up and down
she goes in the little green bus, always sitting on the right so that she
looks out at the golf course and not at the Annexe opposite. In her drawer
with her diary and fevered poems, she keeps Ezekiel’s picture of the Taj
Mahal. In her final year at University, she is three quarters of the way
from the Annexe and a quarter of the distance from Oxford. There is nothing
to do but celebrate the end of exams, the approach of Christmas, going home,
the unwritten future.

It is Friday evening, and she is with Fadz and Sihle and Kenny and Lindy
buying mushroom burgers at Chicken Inn. They will tumble into Fadz’s
battered Beetle and go on to a night of clubbing at Circus. They have been
drinking vodka, and they laugh at the smallest thing. She comes out onto
Inez Terrace, in mid-laugh, and there, holding a box of fried chicken is
Ezekiel. His smile is wide as he moves towards her. He says something, a
greeting, but all she hears is ‘Abraham, Abraham’ as up and down goes the
little green bus. She turns away. He sees her pretending and she sees him
seeing. She pretends not to see the shadow that falls across his face.